It basically falls to promoting the next upcoming event for the public during your current sold-out event. Note I use the word event, not "regularly scheduled trains".

Consider your regular trains as your baseline - attracting visitors to the non-event activity takes time, lots of time, effort and reputation. But you will see onsies/twosies for that. Converting a special event visitor into a regular once a year or every 5 years visitor is dependent on your core operation. That is the hardest to increase. You need to know your area visitors; whether they come in the summer, fall, winter, or spring and try to steer the special events to either side of the peak regular periods to spread out the attendance bulge.

Special events gives you the opportunity for promotion with the ultimate goal to increase attendance to your venue. Since your customers are already in attendance, your target audience is already there - no need for TV ads, flyers, web sites - just hand them the next (series) of events flyer. Yes, you still need to advertise the upcoming events, but guaranteed, if they like what they were at now, convincing them to show up the next time - and letting them know when&where is a no-brainer.

The idea is to build up word-of-mouth & improve your baseline attendance through spill-over from your special events.

For that, you need to be planning out a couple of years into the future.

Depends on the accounting numbers and the coach stock. a) If you refuse to avail yourselves of revenue opportunities readily available to you, donors will correctly infer that you don't need money! b) If your "spare" coaches are turdstock that doesn't fit your collection and you have for no reason whatsoever except Santa, then no. Stop wasting your mechanical department's time. If your reserve coaches are jewels held back from daily running: SN 1005, the Lion Gardiner or the last intact NYC commuter motor, then yes!


I want urgently to meet this museum with badly inflated capacity. At the museums I'm connected with, seating viable for presale is 70 and 112.

Correction of wee-hours-typing made.

One problem:
You can create more event trains in the off-season (Easter Bunny train, Gourmet Cheese train, Murder Mystery train, etc), but too many of these "event" trains may burn out your volunteer base. Thomas by itself puts a big strain on the volunteers and for some it's all they can contribute in one year.

That's one area that's always been a mystery to me and others. How much, if any, do the special events increase normal attendance. I've heard more than one person say that they felt it actually decreased regular attendance, not increased it.

The logic behind that is simple. They were talking about the general public, not railfans, and they were of the opinion that once they'd attended an event, the guests would feel like "they'd been there and done that" and not return for another visit.

Train fans are a different story, new events could well encourage return visits. However, for many museums, the bulk of the revenue comes from the general public, what was called "daisy pickers" in the past era of mainline events.

Often these are families with kids, and looking for things to do. I recall when I was a kid, the family budget was somewhat limited, so we'd do most outings once a year. The local amusement park, the zoo, the aquarium, museums, etc. We also did one vacation a year, typically to a theme park or railroad museum. But in most cases, once we'd visited an attraction once that year, we were done until next year. I'm guessing we weren't the only ones.

Two observations about special events at NCTM in Maryland.

1. We see a "bump" in regular attendance on the days on either side of a scheduled event.
2. In addition to attracting new visitors, our regular patrons make a point to return for one or both of our semi-annual "Cavalcade of Streetcars" events. The Calvalcade is a day when we run multiple cars on a regular 20-30 headway vs. a single car every 40 minutes.

Wesley

Then, your volunteer base is preventing you from succeeding. Or, you think it will.....in either case, it stops you from achievement.

So, supplement your volunteers with getting more volunteers. partner volunteers from other cultural groups, create a college intern program, or temp hire some minimum wage flunkies to park cars or do other unskilled tasks. Why would you think you are limited to only those people you already know?

dave

You can't divert them. You have to attract them to the museum on its own terms. Furthermore, you need them have to have a good enough experience to repeat or recommend a similar visit. This means marketing the museum itself instead of the event. Also, it means providing a high-quality visitor experience to the ~40 people who show up during a slow, non-event day.

For a lot of our museums, the average weekend brings a number people out to what is a pretty big place, where the people spread out and barely bump into one another. It is very easy for these large museum campuses to seem underused or abandoned. While the general public may not want crowds and lines of people, there is a critical mass of people necessary to make the place feel active and successful. Tailoring the visitor experience to better serve smaller groups might be a way to address this problem.

There's a second problem that gets back to quality, and that's competence. Dammit Jim, I'm a railroader not an event promoter!" Part of what fatigues the volunteer corps is trying to do things they suck at. For instance they are internally dissatisfied that they're putting their blood sweat and tears into a hokey product. For another, it can actually be a waste of their time. If you need triple the volunteers to only earn double the money, then why bother. Run more regular days instead.

And having seen museums try it, I must reject the view that special events are magical. Precisely because we suck at them, it's real easy to spend $5000 to earn $3000. And worse that can easily happen without even knowing it. First, the newsletter rejoices the $3000 victory, which sets minds and results in the organization committing to the event in the future. Then the treasurer covers up the losses, probably not intentionally, simply because advertising bills arrive months later clumped, and the bookkeeper debits 4300 Publicity rather than 2743 Yet More Expenses for Buffy the Vampire Slayer Days. And no report ever contains enough detail for a director to try to tally actual event cost, even if he wanted to, which most don't.

Suffice it to say, I am gently skeptical of conjuring successful special events out of thin air. Not that I wouldn't try!


Yeah, partnerships are the way to do it. They combine your strengths (moving trains, taking money) with others' strengths (event planning, zombie makeup, building hay bale forts, marketing to their base, etc.) WRM uses these very, very effectively for their Pumpkin Patch, which is their "too-big event".

Well, many of us suck at railroading too relative to pro standards, so it isn't much of a trade off to substitute another insufficient skill set. And , of course, pro quality railroading skills aren't what we want in the entertainment industry in any case, so that doesn't matter either. We aren't railroads, we are entertainers and, in some sneaky way, educators.......so if we like to pretend we are railroaders instead of producers of events that are designed to attract and please an audience, we have lost before even starting the business, and are doomed to exist on the marginal quantity of people that find their way to our door, and see no reason to return.

dave

Orange Empire hosts an annual "Spring Rail Fest." It used to be the big event and was well attended. The site and the trains were full. I can't help but feel Thomas™ has cannibalized most of that business. Thomas™ does significantly better than the Rail Fest did (including the fee), but I suspect it creates a misunderstanding of what OERM is like once the crowds are gone. A returning visitor is going to find something a lot less "fun" when they come back and there are no food vendors, displays, steam train (Ventura County 2 runs on a limited schedule), or crowds.

It seems more and more like our museums have become dependent on the the one too-big-event to be in the black, and it is a self-perpetuating phenomena because families choose that one event to be the only time they visit. I suppose a comparison could be drawn to Black Friday?

I still think the answer is to improve the visitor experience for the typical day, and promote that.

Dave, I think for a special event, the ruling factor is your competition. (or to be more precise, customer expectation, which you must actively set, or it will default to what your competition does.) For instance Thomas and Polar Express, part of what you're paying for is the the high design and production standards which assure it's not hokey. Malls make similar efforts as this field professionalizes.

For instance in the Detroit market, the Christmas trains are Henry Ford/Greenfield Village and Crossroads/Huckleberry, both large, subsidized operations of national fame, with an entire fake village with a cast of thousands, for whom Christmas is the "pull out all the stops" season. Also a Polar Express opeation and a former Polar Express (and the very engine from the film). You must recognize that this (plus mall Santas) is the standard you must meet or defeat.


That doesn't seem like THAT big a problem because Thomas has a fairly narrow demographic: kids "of that age". Everyone else wants to avoid the Thomas weekends.


Well that's exactly what has me spooked. With all our eggs in one basket, oh so much can go wrong. Did anyone's October event get clobbered in 2001? Mechanical breakdown. Derailment. Takeover attempt. Untimely public-opinion attack. Weather. Just one thing and the ledger turns red, and a marginal museum gets tilted into bankruptcy. Whereas if the revenue is spread through the year, you can recover. Hence, my desire to balance schedules as much as possible.

Let's see at NCTM: 2002 - DC sniper, 2003 - The Fire, 2008 - closed for the move. Just last week two visitors were talking and sure enough, one of them mentions The Fire.

And what helps to keep us going? We designed the facility with a room that can be rented for birthday parties. A room dedicated to little special events planned by others.

Wesley

That is a great example of a "typical day" visitor experience enhancement.

Indeed, I know of one museum whose non-motive power maintenance and mechanical repair work done by four people. At least one of them has to be at this museum whenever the train runs, and by the end of the season, all four are burned out and ready for winter, which is no easier because the other people in this organization are constantly chanting to get more equipment running. This excludes the special event weekends that leave all four burned out from running around try to keep things together.